For many entrepreneurs, this scene is all too familiar: “I lay on my floor looking up at the ceiling, wondering how it had come to this,” writes Andrew Yang in his new book Smart People Should Build Things. “I’d just been responsible for investor losses of hundreds of thousands of dollars and would be naturally lumped in with the second-rate dot-com entrepreneurs of the bubble who were now considered lousy businesspeople.”Continue reading →

Andrew Yang is our first guest on School for Startups Radio today. Andrew was a big-time corporate lawyer and decided one day that it was not for him. He felt compelled to become an entrepreneur and started a company, which after spending quite a deal of his friends and families money, failed. He realized that he loved being an entrepreneur, but was in a hard position to ask for more money now to start another business! And Andrew saw that there would be lots of other people in similar situations, people who wanted to be an entrepreneur who just did not know how. Very wisely, Andrew got jobs at small startups where he was able to learn the basket of skills needed to run a startup and to develop the connections needed in the industry. He excelled with these companies, but knew that he had to again venture out on his own. With the help of some of his new connections, he was able to start Venture for America, an amazing organization that provides entrepreneurial experience for people in their young 20s. Sounds like a great program to us, congratulations Andrew for this great initiative. And you will never guess one of the most popular cities for young students to return to!

I don’t know either; I tried to Google it and couldn’t find out. But I’m pretty confident that the eighth employee joined before the company was cool, built some amazing things, and had an incredible experience—and is now loaded.Continue reading →

As Detroit leaders work to pay back the city’s estimated $18 billion in debt, one entrepreneur is building a rich startup culture that he hopes could revive the Motor City.
Venture for America founder Andrew Yang plans to bring back an entrepreneurial spirit to lower-cost cities by placing top graduates from the country’s elite universities into startups in Detroit, Las Vegas, and New Orleans.Continue reading →

In 2009, when the economy was still convulsing from the financial crisis, Daniel Roth (now Linkedin’s (LNKD) executive editor) published a piece about the future of Wall Street suggesting that the financial industry’s temporary paralysis might be a good thing. “No one likes to see an industry die, but there is an upside,” he wrote in what seemed like a prescient article in Wired magazine that June. “Often, smart cubicle refugees will seize the opportunity to pursue their entrepreneurial dreams, unleashing waves of innovation upon society.” He cited the decline of the Hollywood studio system and the birth of independent film as an example of how one big industry’s collapse might prompt a flowering of creativity and new enterprise.Continue reading →

Check out the latest excerpt from “Smart People Should Build Things” as seen on FastCompany.com

A friend told me about a young Princeton graduate she knew named Cole. Cole studied mathematics and went to work for a hedge fund directly out of school. He’s now making well into six figures at the age of twenty-four. That’s his whole story to date.Continue reading →